


Silver

by fall_into_life



Category: Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Why do I do this to myself, postcanon, shiloh isn't allowed to have nice things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 11:31:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2730866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fall_into_life/pseuds/fall_into_life
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shiloh doesn't have much of anything, these days. (Post-canon, character study)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silver

Shiloh doesn't have much of anything, these days.

(Technically, she owns a lot. Both her father and Blind Mag left her everything in their wills, and GeneCo - Amber Sweet - hadn't interfered because... well, she doesn't know why, but they hadn't. She checks in on the house - it's only _ever_  'the house' now, even in her thoughts - sometimes, just to make sure no one's squatting in it. Otherwise, she has nothing to do with anything from the first seventeen years of her life, and that's the only way she can handle it.)

She carries what she needs in a shoulder bag, and she... wanders.

She'd always wondered what real people did when they weren't at home. The TV shows had always avoided the subject of a job, or the people had worked for GeneCo in one way or another. Even then, as sheltered as she was, she figured that couldn't be all there was, homemaking or working for GeneCo.

As it turns out, the TV was mostly right. There are food dispensers that feed you twice a day if you put your thumb on the keypad, and you live wherever you can keep other people out of. The water and electricity work when they work, where they work, and that's the end of it for most people Shiloh knows.

The few people who do have jobs all work for GeneCo, and they mostly seem to spend their money on surgery and Zydrate in endless cycles.

(It's gotten to the point where if someone smiles and greets her, Shiloh has learned to assume it's someone old with a new face, and watch them for familiar gestures, rather than assume she doesn't know them. It's one of the truths of her new life: appearances change, body language doesn't.)

She thinks even the Graverobber does what he does for a sense of purpose, for fun. He's got enough money by now - _real_  money, not numbers on paper in the envelopes she finds piled up in the house's mailbox when she checks on it - that he could buy his own floater and live high above it all. But he chooses to stay with them, in the dirt and the blood and the desperation, and play a game of cops and robbers with GeneCo.

(And if they're more lenient toward him now, under Amber Sweet, than they ever were under Rotti Largo, well, no one comments on it.)

So what does she do? She learns.

She learns that someone, somewhere, had made everyone, everywhere sick because a book told him so.

(By the standards of education fifty years ago, Shiloh has barely a gradeschooler's understanding of biology, but if someone explained to her the phrase 'biological warfare', she could teach them a thing or two about it.)

She learns that there were so few healthy people left back in the Dark Days, that people made machines that did most things for them, and that's why there aren't many jobs to go around that aren't GeneCo.

She learns that there are so many Repo Men because Rotti Largo treated doctors in exchange for a lifelong contract with GeneCo.

She learns that her father _lied_ , that she's not sick at _all_ , that as soon as she stops taking her meds the only thing wrong with her is that she can't breathe if she gets overexcited.

...

Anyway.

She learns The Graverobber's real name - he whispers it on a cold, lonely night, in-between sips of the one vice Shiloh allows herself, and they never mention it again - and that he's a good guy when he's not hareing off to play with GeneCo and give junkies their next hit.

She doesn't know why he keeps her around, really, and sometimes he gives her these long looks like he doesn't either. Still, they stick together, most times. He cracks jokes about her educating him and disappears if she's been rooting around libraries too long, and she makes him bathe semi-regularly and finds them places to stay that aren't too dangerous.

She doesn't really have him, not really. She doesn't think it's possible for anyone to really have him. The closest anyone can come, she thinks, it's Amber Sweet, who Shiloh catches glimpses of from time to time. (She glimpses too much, really. She knows more about what they both look like naked than she ever wanted to.) Even Amber, though, doesn't have him, she just has his body, and sometimes his attention, which is more than Shiloh ever gets from anyone not herself.

All she has, these days, is her freedom.

And isn't that what she always wanted?


End file.
